Production Group:
Crystal Hsia
BaoPhuong Tran
Amanda Qiu
Hannah Si
Mai Le
This was also the starting point of me loving filmmaking :)
It was not professional at all, but that was our one month effort..
The aim was to show how society relies on Numbers to identify, to classify and so on.
Although it is clearly immature, I keep it as an important moment, it is my starting point !!
Enjoy it :D
Practical Film Project - The Evaluation
Crystal Hsiao-Ting HSIA
Number has become one of the most important sources in our daily life. We could easily list a long list of things about numbers. Since thousands of years ago, numbers had been invented by human, and it turned to conquer us after we used them in our life day by day. Thus, we chose this as our topic of our practical filmmaking project- NUMB3R5. Firstly, I think it is more likely to be a trailer rather than an opening sequence, because we set a lot of enigma code which could make audience wants to carry on and watch what is going on afterwards. Apart from most of the filmmaking production, except of the card dropping part, we did not use a complete story as our narrative device in this film, we used sequences montage of different types of numbers instead. During this filmmaking project, I think I took the role of scriptwriter and a cinematographer, I had to take the responsibility of how a film ‘looks and feels’ and tried every possibility to let our idea happened in our shots. But I have to say most of the idea and effort in this film was an integration of all of us, and I think it worked, two heads are always better than one.
The ABC1 group was our set target audience, because the topic we chose was not an easy one, it was more likely to be thinkable. Our target audience would still tend to be interested in our finished product, but which surprised us was that the film became even tougher than we imagined. However, we did not change our original ideology of this film, so it would hopefully still be attractive to our target audience. This kind of product is complex and really requires some thinking afterwards. The type of our film is likely to be a trailer of a thriller, people who watch this type of film enjoy feeling nervous and curious about what is going on in the film? What is going to happen about numbers? As we did not involve that much speaking and acting in our film, we did not bound our audience thinking.
Our product “NUMB3R5” had no genre because it is an independent film. "Numbers are good, but they could easily conquer human." is our original idea. In the finished product we changed it to "Numbers conquer human." because we would rather take away the positive part than make it too long and boring. By the mystery sound track, this film became quite suspense. As what we have all known, sounds effect is one of the most important sources in a film, it could even easily turned any type of film into another feeling. Another special effect I think is important was the number flashed when the cards were dropped, that could attack audience’s mind and gives the message about numbers are all around us. We used an unbalance shot at the paying part, the tilt down shot looks like audience looking through the CCTV. You can see what is happening, but you could not do anything with it. To give audience clue but never give them a clearly answer could usually work with mystery topics.
Since we were making a low-budget film, our original idea and our final idea were always making an independent film. Apart from the budget issue, independent films are usually shorter than Hollywood film, which is easier to let us approach our original ideology and purpose as we are still freshman in producing films. We tried to choose the locations which everyone usually walks across everyday to position our audience to the message that numbers are all around us. But we did wrong on the locations selections. Although the locations we chose (e.g. rail station, school, classroom, city centre) are really the places which we walk across day by day, they are still too specific to student’s daily life. They could not be the same effective when the audience is not student.
One of my favourite scenes was right before the ending part, the scene with the picture in picture effect. The idea about making shadow on the wall and mix it with other shot work incredibly. The X-ray effect which started from the card dropping sequence continues carry on the mystery emotion, and the shadow of “NUMB3R5” appeared smoothly, which could position our audience back to the beginning part. Furthermore, we speeded up the part while the character was picking up the numbers, it shows the non-verbal code that people are worried when they could not keep numbers. Another likable shot was at the beginning and at the end of the film, there were both the shots of remote control, it was beautifully balance. No matter the hand, the remote and even the pattern of the sofa , all of them were under perfectly vertical.
All of the shooting job should be well prepared, for example the location manager should check if we could shoot at the location. Most of the tilt shot and pan shot did not work smoothly as how we expected, camera operators should have done more rehearsal to find the best speed to show higher quality. Also, as we keep changing our narrative during filming, we did spend a lot of time on some shots which do not work at all. The storyboard should be set before shooting next time, or we will just do whatever pop into our mind and it was quite unorganized. Filming takes ages and we should not waste our ages. All of us have never done any filming before, there is still a lot of thing we need to work it on. Practice makes perfect.
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